More than Movies: FilmAid Seeks to Stimulate Minds and Save Lives

Many are familiar with the need for food, shelter, and medical supplies in refugee camps, but FilmAid—an organization started by Hollywood producer Caroline Baron—looks to tackle a different problem: idle minds.

Screening movies in refugee camps taught Caroline Baron and Mary Soan a surprising lesson: you can never tell what will frighten a displaced child. Movies that might seem innocuous in other contexts—101 Dalmatians, Home Alone, even the Tom and Jerry cartoons—can terrify children who have survived real-life traumas.

“101 Dalmatians is a really lovely movie,” Soan, FilmAid’s regional program director in Thailand, recently told VF Daily. “But Cruella De Vil is really scary. Then there was *Home Alone,*and it’s like, ‘Great movie!’ But [these refugees] have just lost their homes.” To them, Soan says, the notion of a child fending off home invaders—however charming and clever the execution—is no laughing matter.

Clearly, FilmAid isn’t your typical refugee nonprofit. Its goal is not to feed or clothe but to stimulate. The organization presently employees 50 staffers, operating on a multi-million dollar budget, and maintains projects in Kenya, Jordan, Colombia, Hong Kong, and Thailand.

Baron, FilmAid’s founder, is a well-traveled Hollywood producer (Center Stage, Monsoon Wedding, Capote) who, in 1999, came up with the idea of screening films in refugee camps after hearing an NPR segment about the plight of refugees in Kosovo. The segment made her feel helpless, but she proved to be anything but. She enlisted friends including Jane Rosenthal, the venerable producer and business partner of Robert De Niro, and donors including the independent-film studio Miramax. Then she paired up with Soan, an assistant director on Welcome to Sarajevo, Pearl Harbor, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and headed for Kosovo.

As Baron soon realized, showing movies to refugees isn’t as frivolous as it might sound. Boredom is a curse, leading to unease, and even frustration, that can result in conflict, but it’s also an opportunity. Residents are sometimes so hungry for amusement, in fact, that even instructional films enjoy an avid following.

“I learned very quickly that we could use the screens for more than entertainment,” Baron said. “We could also communicate life-saving education. We were drawing huge crowds, and everyone wanted to see what was being projected.”

A nighttime screening in Thailand., COURTESY OF FILMAID

In 2000, U.N.H.C.R. asked Baron to take the project beyond Macedonia to Tanzania and Kenya, where refugees will sometimes spend entire lifetimes in camps. In Kakuma, Kenya, the first piece of media FilmAid screened was a cartoon, followed by The Immigrant, a Charlie Chaplin classic. “It was very powerful for me,” Soan said. “I will never forget that laughter. It was the biggest gift I’ve ever had in my life, in terms of the appreciation of something. It was just a change.”

Soan mounted a projection screen onto a massive truck, which helped enforce a crucial ground rule. “If anybody fights during screenings,” staffers told early attendees, “this cinema has four wheels and it will drive away.” (“We have never had any trouble, and that’s an amazing thing,” Soan said.)

As demand for FilmAid’s services grew, the organization spread to Colombia, the Thai-Myanmar border, and Port-au-Prince, where a donation from Ron and Nancy Proesel enabled the group to bring “the World Cup to Haiti,” in the form of a stadium-quality L.E.D. screen installed in the city’s soccer stadium. In Kenya, FilmAid even helps refugees create movies for film festivals.

Just as information can save lives, ignorance can claim them. The Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa could have proved far more manageable had European and American aid workers better communicated their purpose, rather than inadvertently scaring locals into hiding their sick and, in some cases, storming treatment centers to break out quarantined relatives. “I would love to be there and showing films about how Ebola is real—don’t think it’s a Western conspiracy,” Soan said.

Indeed, health considerations are core to FilmAid’s argument that it provides a service as important as food, shelter, and clothing. “People want to give money for medicine, but they don’t want to give [as much] money for us to talk about people getting immunizations from measles,” said Stella Suge, FilmAid’s country director in Kenya. “In the end, they have to pay for an outbreak, when they could have paid for communication about preventing it.”

Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier from Sudan who now records and performs as a hip-hop artist and starred alongside Reese Witherspoon in The Good Lie, credits FilmAid with providing “a different kind of aid—a skills-driven aid.” Jal performed for thousands of people at a FilmAid-organized concert in Kakuma last year, and FilmAid staff and refugees in Kakuma filmed a music video for his song “Yei.” The video (embedded below) surprised Jal. “It probably would have cost me thousands of dollars to shoot a video like that,” he said, laughing. “They did a good job.”

FilmAid is also different because it includes refugees in the creation of and distribution of aid. “Very few agencies involve refugees in the process of receiving aid, or in changing their own lives,” Suge said, arguing that the one-way relationship familiar to some aid programs “creates a culture that is almost inhuman.”

“The second step [of giving aid], which is to actually empower somebody and let them rise and gain their dignity, that’s the difficult part,” Jal said. “Not many people invest in that. Probably because, I think, it’s expensive. People are more interested in treating problems than finding a cure for a problem.”

In her non-FilmAid time, Baron is producing Mozart in the Jungle, a new series for Amazon. “The similarities to what I am doing now and the work we do with FilmAid are evident—the physical tools, cameras, lights, costumes, the camaraderie of cast and crew, team building, everyone working toward a common goal,” she wrote from the set. “In both worlds we want our audiences to be moved by the end product. But the differences are vast.

“FilmAid’s content is made with extremely limited resources and the final product is not for sale. It is not about commerce,” she continued. “It__ __is about creative self-expression, process, information, education, art and entertainment. We have a specific audience in mind and endeavor to evoke an emotional response while addressing critical issues. We work with individuals who are often cut off from their former lives and/or from the outside world.”

“FilmAid is about humanity,” Suge said. “It’s that people look can beyond having food at their table, and that they, in a sense, they can be man again. They can laugh at something again, that they can watch Charlie Chaplin, and laugh. In a sense, they can have a point of being who they are again, of going back to themselves.”